Posted
by
kdawson
on Sunday October 01, 2006 @07:03PM
from the privatizing-vote-counting dept.

plasmacutter writes to let us know about the new article by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in Rolling Stone, following up on his "Was the 2004 Election Stolen?" (slashdotted here). Kennedy recounts the sorry history of electronic voting so far in this country — and some of the incidents will be new even to this clued-in crowd. (Had you heard about the CERT advisory on an undocumented backdoor account in a Diebold vote-tabulating database — crediting Black Box Voting?) Kennedy's reporting is bolstered by the accounts of a Diebold insider who has gone on record with his concerns. From the article: 'Chris Hood remembers the day in August 2002 that he began to question what was really going on in Georgia... "It was an unauthorized patch, and they were trying to keep it secret from the state," Hood told me. "We were told not to talk to county personnel about it. I received instructions directly from [president of Diebold election unit Bob] Urosevich...' According to Hood, Diebold employees altered software in some 5,000 machines in DeKalb and Fulton counties, the state's largest Democratic strongholds. The tally in Georgia that November surprised even the most seasoned political observers. (Hint: Republicans won.)

This is the perfect answer to the "paper voting can be tampered with anyway" point. The current political landscape is a testbed for unfounded moral equivalency. A lie about a blowjob is not the same as a lie about a war, and in the same vein, paper ballot box stuffing is not the same as electronic vote tampering. The latter has far more potential to improperly influence important elections and to undermine the democratic process than its paper counterpart ever did. If you believe at all in the ability of computer technology to make most other tasks simpler and easier, then you have to at least consider the possibility that fixing elections has just become simpler and easier with the advent of the Diebold machines.

1 - coordinate hundreds or thousands of people to drag off huge ballot boxes across the entire nation

2 - someone in some central location makes a virus which they have a friend smuggle in and install on all ballot boxes.. or they just press a button in the central office and BAM.. all votes swap from bush to kerry!..

It is true that you can certainly tamper an election that's based upon paper ballots. Heck, in 2001 San Franciscans suddenly found ballot box lids mysteriously floating ashore after the November election.

That said, the amount of shady crap surrounding Diebold voting machines is fairly ridiculous. Lets ignore the fact that you have a former CEO, who resigned for allegations of corruption, and who was committed to "delivering" an election to one party. As well as drastically skewed exit polling. All in all, you have a slew of voting machines models that lack the most basic security procedures... such as proper, or any, locks. You also have a fairly complicated voting solution that presents a number of opportunities for a compromise.

Why are Americans such complete and utter *morons* about vote counting? Why do they insist on centralizing vote-counting, one of the most *scalable* problems in civic governance? Instead, form a multi-partisan committee of volunteers fore *each* ballot box. Split up your voting population to keep each box to under 1000 votes or so. Do the count immediately at the close of polling, at the polling place, with the committee and as many observers as signed up in advance (if your party can't muster a volunteer per ballot box, you're not a serious contender in that district).
If you do it the decentralized way you have to corrupt *a lot* of committees to sway the vote substantially. If you centralize the vote counting (moving ballot boxes, electronic voting, etc) you reduce the number of people you have to coopt dramatically. Clearly, anyone intending to corrupt a vote will prefer centralized alternatives. Anyone trying to demonstrate a fair and just election must prefer the decentralized, hard-to-corrupt model.

Nice troll moderation there. At least argue the point.
1. Centralized voting means you only need to corrupt small number of people to corrupt an election.
2. Decentralized voting means you need to corrupt many, many people to substantially change an election result.
3. The US has a history of centralizing its vote counting, using techniques such as moving ballot boxes to central counting locations, and using electronic means to centralize counting.

Given the amount of noise about appearance of fraud in US elections, why isn't vote counting de-centralized? Other democracies seem to manage.

Not only are they clearly just running Windows all the sound effects are default Windows NT 4 sound effects. Not only that, but the sound they chose for clicking a button successfully is the error prompt.

Anyone know of a good bank that doesn't have its head up its ass buying diebold equipment?

Paper records aren't some magic bullet to solve the issue of recounts. Paper is corruptable; this is a return to the problems that electronic voting was supposed to solve.What happens when the count is different? Which is to believed? The perfect, digital count that could be intentionally flubbed or the subject-to-significant-error hand count of corruptable marks on paper?

The 2000 election was decided within the margin of error for paper methods. Digital counts deliver us from this problem, but the paper re

Disclaimer: I am not an American. Do not vote in US elections, and never will.

This is (hopefully!) where the US system actually STARTS to work. (Given that it is currently *not* working) The USA has a very good system of checks and balances - currently these are NOT being used and are not working correctly, but it is inevitable (I say) that they will start to work soon-ish.

While it IS true that US non-voters are the most apathetic bunch of losers possible, it will happen that they actually DO become concerned, but only when things get bad for them personally. Within a few (3-5) years from now, the average US worker will start to realise that they are working 10 hours a week more than they used to, but that their standard of living is not improving. This will be entirely due to crazy monetary policy, political mismanagement, Military stupidity, and excessive foreign borrowing.

THIS is when the corruption will be rooted out of the US system, and I predict many thousands of people will go to jail. Not hundreds, but MANY thousands. It might take years for those responsible to be foundout and imprisoned. (And, if the US court system isn't fixed in the meantime, most of the indicted will die of old age before they get a court date.)

Until things actually get worse for average voters (or actually, average non-voters, because they outnumber average voters IIRC) there will be no "political will" to root out the offenders. Sure, the losers of elections will protest loudly, but unless they are supported by a strong electorate, and strong evidence (combined! One by itself just isn't good enough) then the situation will continue as now: The worst democracy money can buy.

The absolute mystery to me, is how the normally sane people of America, have permitted a voting system which does not have a paper component to be implemented. I believe it is all to do with the "housing bubble" which has put so much money into US pcokets that you've all been far too busy buying Hummers, Plasma TVs, Satelite dishes and going out for dinner, to actually see what's been happening to your country.

Pretty soon though, the housing bubble is gonna burst, and that Hummer will cost $300 to fill the tank, and the Plasma TV will suffer burn-in and the Satelite dish will have 27 arab-speaking channels, and 99 Chinese speaking channels, (All you'll be left with in English) is FOX and 195 channels of Sports) and the restaurants will be closed, or feeding you heart-attack food.

I'm all in favor of the paper trail, I'm just astounded that there are people who think Diebold would 1) fix an election and risk bringing down the whole company, 2) find employees willing to make the code changes and risk jail, 3) find people willing install the changes and risk jail, 4) be able to do it on a large enough scale to make a difference, and 4) be able to keep the entire conspiracy totally silent.

I'm all in favor of the paper trail, I'm just astounded that there are people who think Diebold would 1) fix an election and risk bringing down the whole company, 2) find employees willing to make the code changes and risk jail, 3) find people willing install the changes and risk jail, 4) be able to do it on a large enough scale to make a difference, and 4) be able to keep the entire conspiracy totally silent.

I'm astounded that given the accusations and evidence that this may have actually happened, you refuse to believe that it's possible! Point by point:

1) I can't speak to Diebold's willingness to fix an election, but you are vastly overestimating the risk involved. The whole company is not at stake here - more likely, if some vote tampering were discovered, it would "come to light" that a single rogue coder inserted the offending code into a routine security patch. This guy alone would take the fall for the bulk of it, that is, assuming rock-solid evidence (it would probably take a copy of the actual offending source code, since all other evidence of foul play evaporates in to the papertrail-less void) ever came to light. I believe people have already shown how easy it is to write a self-deleting virus that would remove all evidence of itself as soon as it did its work. (it's easy enough to make something get rid of every trace of itself even in a bloated mess like Windows; it's child's play when your company controls the design, security, and handling of the operating system, hardware, and software at every step along the way). If I had to guess, I would say that we're talking well under a 1% chance of discovery if most of the knowledge of details was confined to the top tier of the company. Even supposing this was discovered, after offering up a patsy, the company would probably just lose its voting machine business and continue as usual with its other stuff. Diebold was getting along fine before getting into the voting biz, they'll do fine if they're kicked out of it, too. Depending on the price, it could well be a very profitable (risk vs. rewards-wise) decision to throw an election to the highest bidder.

2) I'll agree, I don't know how easy it would be to get coders inside the company to knowingly agree to this level of risk. More than that, I would worry about the possibility of the involved coders leaking the fact that they did this so as to push responsibility up the chain if it looked like evidence was mounting against them. If I was to run such a scheme, I'd make sure to go outside the company for this bit, possibly by going to whoever wanted to buy the election to find someone that they trusted - anyone scummy enough to buy an election knows where to go for something like this. It would be easy enough for a high level Diebold exec to obtain API details to hand over, and any knowledgeable programmer could figure out what to do with them in a little time for the right price. Also, it's possible that the specs for the vote-shifting code could be phrased in such a way that the programmer didn't even realize what they were doing - I don't know how Diebold's software works, so I can't really comment any more on that. One easy way would be to ask a programmer to do a security audit, and prove any flaws by writing exploits for them. They hand over the info happily, assuming the flaws will be fixed, only to have them abused instead.

3) From the article, it appears that the people who installed most of the Diebold patches had no idea what was on them, so probably wouldn't face much exposure. And they did agree to install them, despite being suspicious about what was on them, so I think that point is proven - if given a malicious patch, they would install it.

4) This has been thoroughly addressed before - in some cases, all it takes is altering a single machine a local election result. Even for a national election, the margins are so small these days that a few thousand votes here and there really can shift

I'm just astounded that there are people who think Diebold would 1) fix an election and risk bringing down the whole company, 2) find employees willing to make the code changes and risk jail, 3) find people willing install the changes and risk jail, 4) be able to do it on a large enough scale to make a difference, and 4) be able to keep the entire conspiracy totally silent.

You got modded funny for a reason.

"I'm astounded that people think the NAZIs would 1) fix an election and risk bringing down the whole party, 2) find police officers willing to arrest Communists on clearly trumped-up evidence, 3) find courts willing to convict said Communists 4) be able to do it all under the glare of national media 4)(again) be able to keep the entire conspiracy totally silent."

I'm NOT intending to say that Diebold are about to start rounding up all the Jews--although to be honest I think most people of all political stripes are closer to that kind of behaviour than we'd like to admit--but rather that the unwillingness of ordinary people to believe that the Powers That Be would "ever do such a thing" has always been a major weakness in democratic systems. Good democacies and democratic republics have always recognized that their continued existence depends on a balance of antagonisitic powers, and that the system needs to be designed to make fraud and malfeasence as difficult as possible.

Anyone familiar with human history will be aware that people do exactly the kind of things you talk about all the time. Companies lie about drug side-effects, for example (Vioxx), despite the obvious risks. People are stupid, managers doubly so, and never think they are going to get caught.

As others in this thread have pointed out, computers are very good at making massive, precise, pre-programmed changes while maintaining certain types of constraint. Anyone who has ever writtten a one-line Perl script to massively change a document will appreciate what I'm talking about, and anyone who says, "Elections can be stolen under paper ballots too" has clearly never written a line of code in their life. Electronic voting makes easy what was once hard--why set fire to the Riechstag when you can change a few lines of code?

As such, decentralized paper ballot counting is by far the best way to go. In Canada we have scrutineers from each party at polling stations, and paper ballots with electronic readers of one form or another. I leave the polling place knowing that my vote has already been counted by the reader, and that there will be spot-check counts on paper ballots to ensure the reading machine has not been tampered with. It's really not that hard to do.

In that case, might I recommend that Americans bring in the Swiss in order that they may have a supervised election run by an impartial third party? Given that the US has such a hard time ensuring fair elections, they shouldn't be too proud to ask for help.

So for all you geeks out there who believe in objective, external reality, who believe in science as a way of knowing reality, here we have the best science to date to detect electoral fraud telling us that the election was stolen, and people are fucking quoting Mark Twain "Lies, damn lies, and statistics" and shit like that.

Where is the outrage? Almost everyone who frequents/. should have a good idea of how shitty these diebold machines are and how easy they are to hack. Can't you see what is going on here?

An inexact science, which is ok in many instances. Statistics are used because it's cheaper to test or ask a smaller number of people in a population than it is to ask every single member of a population. The whole point of an election is to ask every single person in the population.

here we have the best science to date to detect electoral fraud telling us that the election was stolen

How do you propose to do that? An exit poll? A telephone poll? A visit the voter's house poll? Many conservatives don't respond to polls. Their vote is no one else's business, including pollsters. If they don't respond to the polls, they are underrepresented in the poll data. The statistics may look one way while the real data is another way. It's an inexact science.

Here in Oregon they have no exit polls because there are no polls. Everybody votes by mail with paper ballots. Alternatively, on election day there are special boxes where voters may deposit their sealed and signed ballot envelopes. The ballots are electronically counted, the same way as SAT tests and other such marked forms. Maybe that is a pretty good system for other states to check into.

Many conservatives don't respond to polls. Their vote is no one else's business, including pollsters. If they don't respond to the polls, they are underrepresented in the poll data. The statistics may look one way while the real data is another way. It's an inexact science.

Okay. Here's some more statistics for you: What percentage of the previous exit polls were anywhere near this wrong? If conservatives avoid pollsters now, they should have in previous elections as well. If exit polls are really that impre

I've heard this as an argument against accurate exit polls. Yet I've never seen any evidence or explanation as to why this might be true. Do you have any facts to back this up?

Honestly, it doesn't matter. He could have replaced that claim with "X-type of people don't respond to polls as often as Y-type" (which is almost always true) and his point remains.

Statistical extrapolation can be a wonderful, scientific tool when a couple basic requirements are met: representative, objective datasets and truly random methods. When pollsters and polls fail, it's typically because the analysis lacked these requirements. In many cases, adequately meeting the requirements is impossible. For instance, how do you objectively define people's views on a controversial matter? In other cases, pollsters just get sloppy. For instance, often during elections, pollsters are asked--typically by the ignorant media--to return results before the voting is finished (translation: non-representative dataset). Pollsters who aren't trained properly might also be inclined to interview some types of people more often than others. (non-random methods). And even if everyone involved does everything perfectly, (which itself is nigh on impossible for an operation as large as a national poll) something that everyone seems to forget is that there is still a chance of random error. Even if the p-value is.01 (it is usually.05), that still means that there's a 1:100 chance that the result is wrong due to random variation alone.

The bottom-line is this: the results from exit polling are never more valid than the ballots in the box. Because of the strict requirements proper polling requires, the problem is more likely to be found with the polls rather than the votes--simply based upon the difference in complexity of the math between the two methods alone. (This is one of the few times in history in which Occam's razor legitimately would apply.) Furthermore, if one is willing to accept the possibility of a rigged election (on the basis of the discrepancy, alone), then he or she must also be willing to accept the possibility of rigged polling, which--strangely--is something that nobody ever does.

1. It takes time. It usually takes about 10-15 minutes to fill out a good exit poll form. People with less time on their hands - people with steady jobs, people with kids, people who vote in the morning on the way to work, etc. - are much less likely to accept the polling sheet. On the other hand, people with lots of time on their hands - the retired, the unemployed, often younger voters, etc. - are much more likely to fill out exit poll forms. Given that the unemployed are more likely to vote a certain way (generally for the opposition party, whoever that may be), this can lead to skewed data, not to mention other groups.

2. People fill out polls to make a statement. Again, this tends to favor opposition parties, or parties that are less likely to be represented in a region. People like the idea of voting twice.

3. The organization you poll for could determine who answers your questions. Example - "Hi, I'm performing a poll for University X! Could I take ten minutes of your time?" If the person you are trying to poll doesn't like your university's football team, they may not participate. Or, if a poller represents a news organization the person dislikes, a potential pollee (?) may opt out as well.

4. People honestly forget. This doesn't happen so much in presidential elections, to be sure, but on many exit polls people mark their own votes wrong because they forget what proposition x was or who the candidates for a seat on whatever were.

As someone who has worked exit polls before, let me assure you that they're not always accurate and there are a LOT of things that can throw them off.

2. People fill out polls to make a statement. Again, this tends to favor opposition parties, or parties that are less likely to be represented in a region. People like the idea of voting twice.

Shouldn't have left this point so quickly without going for a deeper explanation. My mistake.

People like to show their support for a candidate they feel very strongly about more than once. Those who vote for Incumbents/members of the dominant party are, generally speaking of course, less passionate about the matter

CNN changed their exit polls for a number of states after the election was called for Bush. The numbers you are seeing at that site were not the numbers produced by their polling organization. You can check the link below, or simply Google for "CNN" and "change" and "exit polls".

It's because typically they don't perform exit polls at all precincts, just those that are seen as particularly close. Thus they may make an election-night projection based upon pre-election polls for the majority of precincts, and exit polls at a select portion. If the results in the precincts that weren't specifically exit-polled turn out differently than expected, then the overall election results will differ from predictions made by those exit polls.

The point in 2004 was not whether they were generally accurate or inaccurate, but how could the same methodology be very accurate in some places (less critical states than florida or ohio) and really incredibly inaccurate in only the areas that were pivitol? Is the quality of polling in Mississippi far better than in Ohio?

Its a faux democracy, just like the all the african dicatorships that call themselves 'democratic republic of foobaristan', those ones where armed militia force citizens to 'vote' at gunpoint. And the suburbs with voters belonging to the opposition parties mysteriously catch fire on polling day.

In the last week George Bush had both houses pass laws giving him the authority to order the abduction and torture of american citizens indefinately, based on his word alone. He also had laws passed that retroactively exempt him from being charged with war crimes and terrorist offenses from 2001 onward.

When any citizen can be abducted by the state and tortured to death 'legally', then that state is a defacto dictatorship regardless of how elections are held, or if they're even held at all. In 5 years America has gone from a democratic state in which liberties are treasured and upheld, to a state teetering on the brink of a facist, fundamentalist and terrorist run nightmare nation of despots and villians. Whats it going to be like 5 years from now?

Absoutely. There will be wide margins in exit polls for Democrats and the Republicans will win anyway. They'll blatantly steal it and dare us to say it was stolen.

See, they've already tested the waters on the "will anyone believe an election is stolen" question. (Whether the 2004 election was stolen or not.) They know the general public will not believe it to be stolen, no matter how compelling the evidence.

Rigging elections undermines everything this country stands for. It is, in a very real definition of the word, treason. Anyone doing it. Anyone ordering it. Anyone knowing about it and not coming forward. Anyone who has taken an oath to preserve and protect the Constitution of the United States, has to take rigged elections as a direct challenge to the authority of that document. As a military person you took an oath to protect the United States from all enemies, foreign and domestic. Someone rigging the ballot box would qualify as a domestic enemy.

That should be one thing we can all agree on. Democrat, Republican, Independent or any other party. Without fair elections we are no longer the United States of America. We are something less.

Since Diebold has a crappy track record with electronic voting, why should we as consumers have any confidence in their ATMs? Even if you don't buy that elections have been stolen, there's enough evidence that Diebold is at best sloppy with their design, implementation and support of their voting machines. With a corporate attitude this lax, how can any banking customer feel good about how Diebold treats money transactions? I've noticed Diebold rolling out more complex ATMs with a lot of useless features. It's not a positive trend.

ATMs are different from voting machines. Diebold doesn't really do much to design an ATM. They use already-existing APIs to interface with the ATM network. Pretty much all they do is grab input, send it across the network and interpret some output. They don't validate a user's account or manage the communication channel or anything complicated like that. The only thing that happens is Diebold code is probably a call to some function like send_withdrawal_request(char *card_number, char *PIN, short amt).

When Edison first made an vote counting machine, the patent office rejected his invention citing concerns that could lead to vote tampering and yet, over a hundred years later, we have all of these problems...Maybe we should just GET RID OF ELECTRONIC VOTING until somebody can make uncrackable DRM software.

Maybe we should just GET RID OF ELECTRONIC VOTING until somebody can make uncrackable DRM software.

DRM has no place in an election. DRM is about restricting the rights of a computer owner. WiMP, for example, has DRM but the OS that uses it is still unfit for network use. DRM is not what the local election commission needs to keep elections honest.

What they need is free and secure software. If the software is free, it can be inspected by anyone with any doubt. If it's secure, inspections won't harm

you can make Free software just as good by requiring specific builds with authorizations keys and what not to install on voting machines, but I am under the impression that would violate the GPL v3. Thanks Richard Stallman!

GPL V3 does not keep people from checking the version of their packages. It's only a GPL violation if you keep the user from modifying or changing their own software.

Yes, anyone can analyze the official source code, but not one can see the source code that was compiled and install

When Edison first made an vote counting machine, the patent office rejected his invention citing concerns that could lead to vote tampering and yet, over a hundred years later, we have all of these problems...Maybe we should just GET RID OF ELECTRONIC VOTING until somebody can make uncrackable DRM software.

Even if you created magical, unhackable software, the hardware tiself is still hackable.

Give me a nice budget, and I'll make you some chips that look just like normal, but have some extra special functionality that is effectively undetectable without depackaging the chip.

In short: Electrons are not visible with the naked eye and as such should not be a critical part of the voting process.

I don't mind the idea of electronic voting, just be sure to give me a printout of my vote in plain english with a tracking number so that I can validate it later on. We cannot just take them at their word on this. This is one of the few cases where I think a paper trail is a must!

This idea is brought up many times, but is inherently flawed. The moment you allow people to take back physical records of how they voted, you open up the possibility (or even inevitability) that people will start selling votes, or start being forced to vote a certain way.

Additionally, if their machines are flawed, it is entirely possible that the printout that you get and the actual vote tally won't be the same anyway. So getting physical printouts really doesn't solve anything at all.

You (and probably also the grandparent post) misunderstand the concept. You get a print out from the machine, and you place the printout into the ballot box. The printout is in every way treated the same as the paper ballot you use in traditional systems. The only difference is that at the end of election day, there is a quick tally available electronically. The paper ballots can (and should) still be counted in order to verify that the electronic tally is correct. If there is a discrepancy, the paper tally is used.

Its better to have the computer print out a ballot because then you remove more problems with voter intent. The printout won't have hanging chads, two choices for the same office, or anything like that.

I can't understand why people don't want a paper trail. I am very suspicious of Diebold, of course, but how can anyone in their right mind be against a hard copy receipt of a vote? The electronic system we have now is so incredibly bad, I can't imagine someone approving it unless they were corrupt and directly making money/gaining power from it.

If you have a tracking number, there is the possibility that voters can be bought or threatened into voting a certain way.

I tell you that unless you vote for Mr. X, I will break your legs. You go vote and I demand your tracking number (or I break your legs anyway). I can verify that you voted how I wanted you to.

The best paper trail is for the voting machine to spit out a form/card/whatever with the name of the person you voted for printed/punched on it. Then you drop that into a locked box. Later, that locked box is opened in front of anyone who wants to watch and the votes are sorted and counted.

We have the technology to do that already.

But it seems that having an easily verifiable paper trail is not something that our politicians are interested in.

We just don't give a fuck. The Prime Minister of Hungary is caught admitting to lying to the public about the economy on tape and Hungarians are out RIOTING (including tear gas!) in the streets. Our President has all but been caught lying about everything, royally fucking up everthing he's touched in the process, and the best we can muster is Bill Clinton, Richard Clarke, and Cindy Sheehan.

No, we're all so wrapped up in which club is the most popular that we don't actually really care how the country runs. Most of us are under the mistaken impression that our system can never go really wrong.

Take you, for instance. I bet you've managed to completely ignore the evidence mounting that Rumsfeld has personally authorized torture, that the war in Iraq was justified by supposed facts that the administration was well aware weren't true, that they leaked the name of a CIA agent for political gain, that there was plenty enough evidence lying around to figure out 9/11 was giong to happen and stop it before it did, that the government has been engaged in illegal spying operations on the American people, and a whole host of other injustices. You cover your ears and close your eyes and shout "Na na, I can't hear you!" like a petulant child while out of the other side of your face you invent all kinds of justifications that you think somehow condone behavior that's blatantly illegal. Not to mention the less flashy corporate corruption inherent in giving all the Iraq reconstruction deals to Haliburton.

At least the Democrats had the decency to be quietly embarassed about Bill Clinton's use of his office for personal gain (Tyson chicken (while he was governer), Whitewater and interns) and his lying on the stand. Republicans get in my face and shout "War is Peace!" "Freedom is Slavery!" "Criticism of the government is unpatriotic!" "Adultery is grounds for impeachment!". Lying on the stand is though, IMHO, but none of the Republicans seemed to be upset about that, perhaps because they didn't want to call attention to a behavior they seem to be so in love with themselves.

Not that I'm all that happy with the Democrats either. They want a nanny socialist state where everybody speaks very softly in order to avoid offending anyone. But I'd rather descend into that than the stick-up-your-ass facism the Republicans want, especially since they to a one seem to be in deep denial about it.

When are you americans gonna finally get it ? Why do you think so much effort goes into fund raising for a campaign, and, the press virtually declares the one with the most funds a winner, months in advance. Elections are not won on the campaign trail in the usa, they are BOUGHT on the campaign trail.

Raising funds / winning elections. There is a cause/effect relationship here folks. Wake up, smell the roses, elections are just like anything else in america, sold to the highest offer. If that wasn't the case, then fund raising wouldn't be the most critical part of an election campaign.

I just wanted to point out an interesting method of creating a secure paper trail that came out recently (September 28th 2006) by Ronald L. Rivest of M.I.T's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. It's called the ThreeBallot Voting System [mit.edu] (.pdf format).

The interesting thing about it is that it handles both voter privacy and verifiability without requiring encryption of the ballot. Rather than give a poor explanation because of lack of space (the paper itself is 13 pages long), I encourage interested people to read it.

It's certainly interesting, but completely impractical. If people can't reliably punch a hole in a card, there's no way they can be expected to correctly follow these directions:

To vote FOR a candidate, you must fill in
exactly two of the bubbles on that candidate's row.
You may choose arbitrarily which two bubbles in
that row to fill in. (It doesn't matter, as all three
ballots will be cast.)

Why hack the election when you can just steal it the old fashioned way?

* Give poor voting precincts ancient machines and very few of them so that people have to wait hours and hours in line to vote. Isn't that what we saw in 2004?

* Dream up a system of "provisional ballots" to placate voters when a voter is "challenged" -- and then never count those provisional ballots.

These tactics are the way the past 2 elections were stolen, and they're profusely documented. Even the huge exit poll discrepancies of the 2004 elections were ignored by the US corporate mass media.

And don't forget the way BBC reporter Greg Palast [gregpalast.com] clearly documented that Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris eliminated more than 90,000 Florida voters in 2000 as "suspected felons" -- with over 90% of those voters being Democrats. But you're read about that scandal in the US corporate mass media, right?! (Not!)

Sorry, the elections are already being "hacked" and it doesn't take an electronic voting machine to do it.

The traditional political science term for this is "voter suppression". It has a long history in the US.The vote of blacks were suppressed in many ways, for many decades. One can say that black votes are still being suppressed, albeit in more subtle ways.

If one reads the book "Why Americans Don't Vote" the academic researchers/authors of that book note that the entire system of voter registration was enacted not to stop multiple votes and voter fraud, but instead to suppress the vote of Pennsylvania farme

Don't take my word for it. Take the word of the Democrats' own expert [slashdot.org] who did a lot of the work behind the report RFK was basing his article on.

In his words:

RFK's article is misconceiving, socially damaging and simply wrong---much like his previous one on autism and vaccines. RFK selectively cites the DNC report. More voters supported Bush in Ohio in 2004 than Kerry. There is no scientific evidence that they did not. There were some irregularities (such as the allocation of voting machines), but they were not large enough to change the outcome. Bush won in 2004; Democrats have to admit that he really did if they are to fix their electoral problems much like how an alcoholic first has to admit that s/he has a problem.

Here in the UK we use old-fashioned paper ballots, hand counted. No tabulating machines, no hanging chads, no technology at all. In a General Election, the polls close at 10PM and the earliest constituencies usually declare their results around 1AM. By 8AM the next morning there are only a few left to declare and the result is known. This is in a country of some 60 million people - there is no reason why it couldn't scale up to the US population.
Why complicate things and introduce more potential for fraud?

Warren Slocum [warrenslocum.com], who is in charge of elections here in San Mateo county, is extremely critical of touch-screen voting machines. He liked the system we had here - big paper ballots marked with black markers, which the voter inserts into the scanner atop the ballot box. This gives a quick count when the polls close, and the ballots are locked in the box in case a recount is needed.

But we couldn't keep that system. It wasn't compliant with the "Help America Vote Act", which requires touch-screen machines for "accessability" by blind people. San Mateo had to go touch-screen, but it went with Hart InterCivic eSlate machines. They're still not high-security devices, but they're way better than the Diebold crap. Slocum pushed to get California to require printers for manual recounts on all California touch-screen machines, and that's now the law in California.

But Hart InterCivic has problems, too.

"Gail Fisher, manager of the county's Elections Division (for Travis, TX), theorizes that after selecting their straight
party vote, some voters are going to the next page on the electronic ballot and pressing "enter,"
perhaps thinking they are pressing "cast ballot" or "next page." Since the Bush/ Cheney ticket is the
first thing on the page, it is highlighted when the page comes up - and thus, pressing "enter" at that
moment causes the Kerry/ Edwards vote to be changed to Bush/ Cheney."

You'd think with the evidence and coincidences that are showing up, that people may actually think these guys have something it say. Instead, some of you just dismiss it as BS. I'm a card carrying libertarian, and I'm siding with the liberals on this one. There's something fishy going on here, and I think it should be investigated.

I wonder, if the positions were reversed and you felt you were losing your country, would you:

A. Still give a fuck?B. Be outraged that fellow citizens don't listen to you, just because they have a different stance on abortion?

Maryland Governor Bob Ehrlich, a Republican, ran into stiff opposition after (Diebold?) voting machines caused major problems in the state's primary elections this year. Ehrlich wanted to switch to paper-based methods that were known to be reliable. The opposition was NOT from his own party, but from the state's Democratic majority and career bureaucrats.

I don't care what political party you are in (or which party you hate).

Honest elections should NOT be a political issue. It should be a PATRIOTIC issue.

We need a list of requirements for honest elections and we, THE PEOPLE, need to work with each other to get them implemented.

I don't care if you're Liberal or Republican or Libertarian or Communist or Green. I will gladly work with you for honest elections in America. You may beat my favoured Party, but we should all be able to see that it was an honest election and an honest victory.

You may be right... there may be nothing to this but paranoia and sour grapes on the part of Democrats that lost.

But with Diebold style machines, how can anyone ever prove otherwise? With no paper trail, this issue is going to come up in every single election. The loser will claim that the election was stolen, and there will be no way for anyone to prove that it didn't happen.

That's why we need systems where the results are open to public inspection/recount and difficult to hack. Paper ballots meet this criteria. Electronic machines with a voter-verified paper trail meet this criteria. Diebold machines do not. Even if we assumed that every person involved with those machines was in fact 100% honest and above cheating, they'd still be unusable as an electoral mechanism, because every election result would be suspect.

Always the conservatives are screaming about "balance." Reality itself is not "fair and balanced." The Republicans are destroying the country, the environment, and the Earth. Not the Democrats. So get over it. The very notion that media needs to be "balanced" is how we got into this position in the first place.

Media is supposed to report on what is happening. Not make you feel better about your political views if they suck, or make you feel as though you're just as good as everyone else if you're not.

newsflash: republicans see democrats destroying the moral foundation of the country, selling us out to international law via the court system, pandering for votes from illegals, wanting to destroy any successful corporation, etc.

The difference is that you see the things you disagree with, while the things you agree with you tend to gloss over. Most right wingers see CNN, NPR, BBC, etc as liberal (while most leftists call them neutral) and most liberals call Fox conservative (while most rightists call it

First, the republicans do not see the democrats as destroying the moral foundations. It is the neo-cons that claim that. It is these neo-cons that have such representations as Foley, Abramhoff, Hassert, Delay, Cheney, Bush, and Rumsfield.

As to/. heading left, you have to be kidding. I am a very long time libertarian (and actually more conservative than those that are in my freaks lists), and I can tell you that it is NOT heading left. Not compared to what we had just 9-10 years ago, or even 6 years ago. I

Look at what's happening in Europe as the muslims are flooding in and reproducing faster than the natives. Pretty soon, you'll see them adopting Sharia there. If you want to see a country become destabilized as they lose the core values that binds them all together, good luck in the ensuing anarchy.

Way to sound like a bigot. More importantly, this is what societies do, you know? Things change. Demographics change. Some people reproduce quickly, others slowly. As populations shift, practices and policies shi

Sometimes it seems to me that the Neocons (I was raised Republican, still hold those values, and consider myself to be a moderate, but in today's spectrum that makes me a liberal. But I still don't want to sully the 'Republican' label.) have taken the liberal concept of 'cultural relativism' and run with it, convincing themselves that 'factual relativism' is real and applicable to the world.

But IMHO 'cultural relativism' is/was primarily a tool to help you understand the other guy, his roots, motivations, etc, so that you can deal with him. Applying either 'relativism' to your own actions in the real world tends to be an exercise in wishful thinking, and sometimes that can be disastrous.

There seems to be a new (I'll call it) 'Neocon meme' showing up on Slashdot and other net sites, with a couple of notable characteristics:* This site just has a liberal slant, and you'll shout me down for this.* The Republicans may have some problems, but the Democrats are just as bad.* The nation as a whole is politically much different from this site.

I'm not saying the Democrats commit election fraud. I'm not saying the Republicans commit election fraud. What I am saying is that at no presidential election before 2000 was election fraud even brought up.

Not in 1996, 1992...1976, 1972, 1968 etc.

So, why is it that accusing someone of election fraud is now automatically a Democratic trait? The Democrats didn't accuse anyone of election fraud when Reagan or Bush Mk.I took office, not when Nixon destroyed McGovern. Just as the Republicans didn't call shenaigans when Clinton, Carter, and Johnson won.

Maybe there's evidence this time? Something that wasn't there every other election.

I'm not saying the Democrats commit election fraud. I'm not saying the Republicans commit election fraud. What I am saying is that at no presidential election before 2000 was election fraud even brought up.

It would seem that seem that RFK Jr and many in the public have a rather myopic memory when it comes to allegations of vote fraud. One would expect that Mr Kennedy would certainly be aware of the controversy surrounding the outcome of the 1960 Presdential election especially since his uncle John F. Kennedy was elected.

Or was he? Rather than Ohio and Florida, that election came down to narrow wins in Illinois and Texas. Both states were Democrat-controlled and rife [opinionjournal.com] with [slate.com] allegations [washingtonpost.com] of fraud [wikipedia.org]. Did Mayor Daley of Chicago arrange for the dead to vote? Did Johnson's own political machine throw Texas? Like 2004, the answers depend on who you ask.

So are we to just throw up our hands and do nothing then?If the answer is yes, why?If the answer is no, what should we do?

I figure the minimum you can do is to make some noise. Talk about it with your friends, and even strangers. That's the least you could do to save your democracy.

So/. is the least we can do. The most would be to take to the streets like they do in other countries but I don't think most people in the US care about their votes like the people in mexico or ukraine do. We are just too fat du

I tell anyone who I think could begin to wrap their brains around the concept; a lot of people, even otherwise bright intelligent folks, just don't seem to be capable of understanding that THEY are being screwed.I find it more in younger people; if you were in public school in the late 60's or 70's, you can easily believe in corrupt government being something you should care about; if you were in Public school in the 80's or 90's, then you have difficulty looking away from anything bright & shiny.We are

WHO GIVES A FLYING RATS CRACK WHO IT WAS THAT STOLE IT, THE POINT IS IT WAS STOLEN. Im not a democrat, im not a republican. for shit sakes Im not even american (though like most of the world, I am affected by their mistakes blunders and outright stupidity). It doesnt matter what party he represented, IT MATTERS THAT HE RIGGED THE ELECTION. It doesnt matter what party a vote rigging accuser votes for IT MATTERS THAT BUSH RIGGED AN ELECTION TO DEFRAUD THE AMERICAN PEOPLE. Hell, personally, I think both sides

1) Both the 2000 and 2004 elections were VERY close. They ultimately came down a to a relatively thin margin of votes in select states. So we basically get into an uncertainty situation because we end up having to measure a vote exactly when the technology is rather imprecise (hanging chads, etc)

2) Electronic voting machines did not exist in significant quantities prior to the 2000 election. Given that there's no physical evidence to support the numbers that come out of the polls, it creates a definite sense of insecurity.

3) We have seen ample evidence of deliberate efforts by Republicans to distort the vote. In Ohio there were many fewer polling machines made available to typically Democratic districts. They also gave people registration forms that were invalid, then said they wouldn't accept them. Also don't forget the phone bank jamming scheme in New Hampshire that hamstrung get out the vote efforts by Democrats.

4) Gerrymandering of districts has meant that the margins of victory have shrunk in many locations. You gerrymander by dividing up opposition support accross enough of your own candidates. So you end up with two of your candidates winning by say 5% rather than having one win by 10% and the other narrowly lose.

There was a direct correlation between accuracy of the exit poll in a given precinct with the balloting technique used. Where a paper trail exists, the exit polls were statistically more accurate than in precincts where electronic voting was used (no paper trail.)

In my opinion, that's a clear indicator of something being wrong with the vote counting in those precincts, not the exit polls. I have the raw data of exit poll numbers from several states, voting method in precincts, and the final results. There's a clear correlation. However, those data files aren't handy here - google it yourself, or follow the links from this Wikipedia article (I know -- not the most reliable source, but it's a starting point): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_U.S._presidentia l_election_controversy,_exit_polls. [wikipedia.org]

The worst episode of outright election fraud in American history was in 1876 [wikipedia.org]. Both parties took part and the Republicans traded ending Reconstruction in the South for a Presidential win from Democrats. In the process seriously damaging civil rights for African-Americans in the South until the 1960s.

Maybe there's evidence this time? Something that wasn't there every other election.

Exactly. In the 2004 Presidential election, exit poll numbers in key battleground states varied drastically from the actual results. That's extremely suspicious because people often have no reason to lie to unbiased pollsters about who they voted for. According to several statistical experts (who are far more knowledgeable about stats than the average Slashdot poster, and 7 out of 10 people would agree...) the discrepancies were statistically impossible. It was a big, red, flag that something was amiss in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and several other states. Read this statement from Kennedy's first article:

According to the exit poll, Kerry should have received sixty-seven percent of the vote in this precinct. Yet the certified tally gave him only thirty-eight percent. The statistical odds against such a variance are just shy of one in 3 billion.(40)

If you have a rational, scientific mind, that's about as conclusive as it gets. It's certainly enough to pique the interest of people like Robert F. Kennedy, who then ask questions like "Was the last election fixed?" and "Will the next one be?" So Kennedy digs around and does some good old-fashioned investigative reporting, he follows the money trail, and lo and behold it leads to disgraced Republican influence peddler Jack Abramoff and several sleazy advocacy groups!

In a clever twist, HAVA effectively pressures every precinct to provide at least one voting device that has no paper trail - supposedly so that vision-impaired citizens can vote in secrecy. The provision was backed by two little-known advocacy groups: the National Federation of the Blind, which accepted $1 million from Diebold to build a new research institute, and the American Association of People with Disabilities, which pocketed at least $26,000 from voting-machine companies.

For those who don't know how this kind of campaigning works, what you do is create a group with a bullshit name like "Citizens for Truth and Honesty in Government". The name sounds too good to be true. I mean truth...honesty? Who isn't for that stuff? Then the group you just formed and paid turns around and supports your candidacy, your issue, or whatever

Diebold machines were rammed down our collective throat under shaky pretenses and by players who couldn't possibly be more politically biased. Kennedy wants to spread the word.

"According to the exit poll, Kerry should have received sixty-seven percent of the vote in this precinct. Yet the certified tally gave him only thirty-eight percent. The statistical odds against such a variance are just shy of one in 3 billion.(40)"The problem with this claim is that the one in three billion number is calculated by assuming that the exit poll was taken by a completely random sampling of voters. Of course, exit polls are not collected at every polling station, and we expect to see different

Holy cow. You made some huge assumptions about what you think was assumed when the exit poll analysis was conducted. Members of The National Election Archive Project [uscountvotes.org], the non-partisan watchdog group to whom the the one in 3 billion figure can be attributed, will be the first to tell you that every single factor you just described made its way into their analysis of the polling data. Yes, seriously.

If I were a ruder Slashdot poster, I would have responded with something like "Who the fuck are you? The woman who wrote the white paper on this graduated Cum Laude from the University of Utah with a master's in mathematics and has been analyzing poll data for 10 years..." and so on, but rather than resort to an ad hominem attack, I'll just assume that you replied without taking the time to check the sources that describe in vivid detail how the analysis was performed. Here is a link to the pdf [uscountvotes.org] that describes the process that was used. I know reading an 18 page document is not half as easy as just writing a paragraph where you just make random, uneducated guesses about what it contains, but you might want to give it a shot.

"Exit poll discrepancies are considered "one tail significant at the five percent level" if there is less than a5% chance of that amount or greater of discrepancy occurring due to the random chance of selectingvoters as they leave the polling location."

No, she clearly says that she assumed voters were selected at random (random chance of selecting. ..). Of course, I could tell that she made this assumption without even reading the paper, because it is literally the only assumption you can make with the amount of data they have. She goes on to say:

"When plotted by official vote count or by exit poll shares, we can see what patterns of exit polldiscrepancy are produced by1. different partisan exit poll response rates (such as the hypothesized Kerry-to-Bush voterresponse rate of 56% to 50% that was proposed by Mitofsky to explain the 2004 presidentialdiscrepancies),2. vote miscounts, and3. random sampling error.There are other factors which influence exit poll discrepancies, not listed above. However, not enoughdata has been released by exit pollsters to know whether or not these other factors would affect ananalyses of WPD (within precinct discrepancy) patterns plotted by official vote count or exit poll shares.Common-sense tells us that such other factors will not significantly influence this analysis, but we donot know."

Of course, she does not list those other factors, but I would argue they they are significant (of course I only have a degree in Chemical Engineering, so it's not like I know anything about statistical analysis).

Well, here is my take - the Democrats are going to contiue to push this issue in the spotlight... it is in their advantage to do so... In the same way the military preps a target with airstrikes before a ground assault, the Dems are preparing the population for their legal challenges if they don't win back the house and senate. The challenges don't even have to be successful, if they cause doubt, they win (in terms of converting people against the "establishment").

Well here is my take. If there was fraud and a US Presidential election was thrown, then people should go to jail. This isn't about how wins the next election. This is about who really one the last two elections. If voting "doesn't count" in the US anymore, that is about as serious an issue as can be raised. If you want to cast it as a partisan debate, then you just don't get it.

No, the Democrats lose because the party has not been able to put up someone inspiring (or hell, electable) since Clinton (Or arguably JFK). Say what you want about Clinton or Regan, they both inspired people, and both convinced the majority of voters (not tiny contestable majority either) to get the job. Bush sucks, but he keeps his job because (1) his opponents have somehow managed to be less appealing than him and (2) the Democrat party has basically become the "oppose Bush" party. No real ideas of their own, no "contract with America" style plan to recapture the votes, just oppose Bush at every turn. Don't get me wrong, if Bush and co keep screwing up that eventually will work, but he probably could have been easily beaten (election fraud or not) if there were some kind of leadership or direction in the Democratic party.

Granted I didn't like him. But I did not like him because he expanded the power of the executive branch greatly through executive orders, he bombed a couple of countries for no good reason, he displayed absolutely no respect for privacy with the Clipper chip initiative, and his staff was mired in conflict of interest, incompetence, and other questionable activities.

They work fine for you, and I'm sure the exit polls match the results(go lula), but in the first world of the USA, electronic voting just makes it easier to cheat. The CEO of the electronic voting company(Diebold) actually guaranteed a republican win, it's that bad. They have manipulated the people via the press so we now think that exit polling is inaccurate. This ensures there is no oversight over electronic voting - exit polls are the only oversight we have. We use exit polls to determine fraudulant elections in places like Ukraine, but in the United States, we're worse off than Ukraine.

In many ways it's shameful, but politics in the U.S. is fierce and divided moreso than most other countries. The arrogant international attitude you see also applies to domestic politics. It's anything goes here and it's very machiavellian - whatever it takes to win will be done.

Not even talking about gerrymandering. Even if the democrats make significant gains, they will need 57% of popular vote to take the lower house. This should be 50% but due to gerrymandering, democrats have almost insurmountable odds. The U.S. is a banana republic.